Former Apple employees have made an HTML 5 creation app

I guess after giving Adobe plenty of opportunity to step up to the plate and seeing their HTML 5 export feature tacked onto the $700 Flash CS Suite, some former Apple employees decided that just wasn't good enough. So they created an app called Hype. Here is a video of it:

It's not clear yet how well it will integrate into database-driven websites but seeing the feature set, it looks like a good app. The company also makes a PHP editing app so I expect they will understand the requirements to integrate it with non-static sites and it's all standards-based so shouldn't be too much trouble.

This is what the web has needed for so long - competition in the realm of delivering rich content so that developers aren't forced to pay over the odds for Adobe's software and avoid being restricted by the availability and performance of their plugin.

Jonathan Deutsch - previously was an engineering manager at Apple responsible for teams working on Mail.app, Mac OS X updates and automation tools.

Ryan Nielsen - was a senior member of the Mac OS X Project Management team at Apple. As a part of that team, he guided the development of five major Mac OS X releases, shaping everything from the schedule down to the design and implementation of individual features.

I'm surprised it has taken this long to get an app like this out in the open. Apple was touting HTML 5 ages ago - the Flashless iDevices have been out for 4 years now. It would have had made the work of content publishers much easier to migrate to HTML 5 with an easy-to-use tool like this.

Part of the hold up will have come from the decisions made about the HTML 5 standard but an app like the above could have evolved with the spec. The app even has a compatibility checker to be able to downgrade features in order to support multiple browsers.

The showcase on the site looks fairly weak just now but the app only came out a couple of weeks ago so it'll take time for people to use it properly. Hopefully we'll see more of the same type of app coming out from other developers too.